Advocates Struggle To Provide Adequate Shelter For Workers

HURRICANE AFTERMATH: - IMPACT ON MIGRANT WORKERS

ARCADIA -- The sheets on Jesus Villa's clothesline are clean and smell fresh, but all around her small home, the remnants of nearby mobile homes and trees litter the ground and rot in the sun.

Piles of lumber, metal, old toilets, beds and other debris left over from three hurricanes compete for space with festering fire-ant mounds in much of DeSoto County.

For a glimpse of the housing problems -- and opportunities -- created by the storms, Villa's Pensacola Avenue offers insight.

Of the eight mobile homes housing migrants along the narrow, paved road, only the one she lives in and one next door survived the pounding of the storms.

"No one was hurt. No one was killed," she said in Spanish, giving thanks for that miracle as she collects the wash and struggles to resume some sense of normalcy.

While Villa, 23, and her husband, Mario Castillo, 29, migrants from Mexico, wonder whether they will have enough work in the citrus and tomato fields that were also hit by the storms, a small army of people committed to helping farmworkers strains to grasp the enormity of the task.

There is the home builder pitching alternative housing as a fast fix and a nonprofit company with designs for a new generation of farm housing. There are Catholic charities studying the needs of the poor and public agencies struggling to network on the fly, each bringing more questions than answers.

"This is a national disaster," said Brian Bishop, a longtime South Florida builder and president of Home Front Inc. The company makes panelized housing, a speedy, construction technique that may fill at least a small part of the demand for fast housing replacement for low-income farmworkers.

"We've got to move fast and think out of the box," said Jay Taylor, a tomato grower and board member of Florida Housing Finance Corp., a group that helps finance affordable housing. Mobile homes such as those on Pensacola Avenue, maligned through the years as rattletraps, should play a role in the replacement process, said Christine Talcott-Roberts, a migrant-farmworker specialist in Florida for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

"It's striking how well some trailers did, while others did not. So it can play a part," Talcott-Roberts said. "They are so much faster to get up than block or wood [homes]" and less expensive, too, she said.

No one has a handle on the full scope of the needs -- how many units are required, where they should or can be built, who will pay and how quickly they can be available.

Farmworkers who live on Pensacola and in nearby neighborhoods commute to other counties. That makes it harder to pinpoint needs, because estimates of worker numbers are based on crops and not on population.

In DeSoto, the county last year licensed units for about 3,000 workers, even though as many as 10,000 workers are estimated to be there in a typical season. "We don't know where the other 7,000 are" in any given year, said Keith Keene, who inspects migrant housing.

These licensed units are inspected monthly, Keene said, to ensure they are livable, not overcrowded, that the garbage is collected and refrigerators work well enough to keep food safe.

Ordinary homes in DeSoto do not have such minimum standards, Keene said, leading to the paradox that many poor families in this hardscrabble county live in conditions as bad or worse than migrants do.